With the extensive application of e-commerce services in life, online shopping has become one of the main manners of the e-commerce services. After a terminal such as a mobile phone, a tablet computer or a smart television is purchased on a shopping platform provided by a server, in the prior art, a user needs to manually input a unique identifier of the terminal to the shopping platform provided by the server, and meanwhile, a seller may also need to make a corresponding input on the server, which has disadvantages of complex operations, poor security and poor user experience.
To further describe the foregoing disadvantages of the prior art clearly, that a server performs refund service processing on a terminal is used as an example for specific description below.
Because of the particularity of remote shopping, a buyer can receive a commodity only after browsing a picture of a terminal online, and placing an order to buy the commodity corresponding to the picture. Therefore, an incident occurring in the post or other various uncertainties that can be imagined may lead to inconsistency between the commodity received by the buyer and an actual commodity. As a result, refund is needed in many cases.
Refund cannot be executed simply. Refund can be performed only after operations such as goods return and goods warehousing are completed, so as to ensure interests of both the buyer and a seller. Therefore, at present, a technology used for refund of the terminal purchased online is generally that: a user accesses, by using an Internet access device, a shopping mall web page provided by the seller, fills in related information such as an order, a commodity, and an unique identifier of the commodity on the shopping mall web page, and submits a return or exchange application on the shopping mall web page.
Specifically, for the terminal, in order to ensure that the returned terminal is the commodity sold by the seller, the seller requires the buyer to provide the unique identifier of the terminal, while the user needs some skills to acquire the unique identifier. For example, for a mobile phone, *#06# needs to be inputted by using a keyboard, and then an IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) code, as the unique identifier of the mobile phone, can be acquired.
The following uses a mobile phone as a specific example of the terminal for description of the prior art. In the prior art, after a buyer buys a mobile phone online, if refund is required, the buyer may access, by using an Internet access device such as a mobile phone or a computer of a third party, a shopping mall web page provided by a seller, so as to log in to a website of an e-mall to perform a complex return and refund application. With this technology, the buyer at least needs to perform several operations. For details, refer to FIG. 1. FIG. 1 is a flowchart of a refund method for a mobile phone in the prior art. As shown in FIG. 1, the refund method for a mobile phone in the prior art includes the following steps:
Step 101. A buyer logs in to a shopping platform system by using an Internet access device. Specifically, the buyer can log in to a web page provided by the shopping platform system.
Step 102. The buyer chooses an order, queries the order for a mobile phone to be returned, manually inputs an IMEI code of the mobile phone, taps confirm, and submits related information to the shopping platform system. The related information includes the order and the IMEI code of the mobile phone.
Step 103. The shopping platform system creates a refund order according to the foregoing related information, where the refund order includes an account of the buyer and a purchase amount.
Step 104. The seller performs refund manually according to the account of the buyer and the purchase amount that are recorded in the refund order.
According to the refund method for a mobile phone in the prior art, the buyer needs to manually input the IMEI code, and the IMEI code can be acquired only after *#06190  is inputted by using a keyboard of the purchased mobile phone. This process is relatively complex, error-prone, and time-consuming. In addition, after the mobile phone is warehoused, the seller further needs to manually query for the account of the buyer and a product price that are recorded in the order, and make a refund manually to the buyer. This process also seems complex, and manual operations are error-prone and time-consuming.